Whilst I was on holiday an excellent article on High Fidelity appeared in MIT Technology Review : The Quest to Put More Reality in Virtual Reality. Ok first of all let’s get a couple of questionable parts of the article out of the way. Tom Simonite seems to talk of Second Life in the past sense, which will rub many a Second Life user up the wrong way as Second Life is still going pretty strong, despite reports to the contrary. Then there’s this claim :
Some of what his company is creating is much the same as Second Life. You download some software and then enter a virtual space where you can steer your avatar around and build stuff. This time, though, building is much easier, the lag mostly eliminated, and the graphics more impressive.
Anyone who has had a peek at High Fidelity will know that the building is not much easier and nor are the graphics more impressive at this stage in the development of the platform. High Fidelity is making some bloody impressive strides right now but it’s still very much an Alpha product.
Then there’s the stock photograph of Philip Rosedale that is used, we need a new modern Philip photo, I’ve seen that one umpteen times! However the above aside, it’s an excellent article that captures so very well the fantastic enthusiasm Philip Rosedale has for virtual worlds. Admittedly I’m an unashamed Philip Rosedale fanboi, despite not always agreeing with him, but the man has a long held dream and it’s one that captivates me. Whereas some may think of Philip Rosedale; “Dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer, well can you put your hands in your head, oh no!” the answer to that is that with the right peripherals, in High Fidelity you can put your virtual hands in your virtual head, oh yes!
The article explains how High Fidelity is taking a very different approach from Second Life in some areas and this is where I believe that High Fidelity is most definitely on the right track :
High Fidelity’s business model is less developed. Most of its software and platform will be open source, so anyone can use it or set up a virtual world using its technology. High Fidelity plans to make money by charging people to include their worlds in a kind of directory for the metaverse, similar to the domain name system for the Web.
I’ve said this before, more than once, but where I feel Second Life failed to adopt mass appeal is because it’s Second Life. Mass appeal may well come for a Linden Lab product running Linden Lab created technology, but I’m not convinced that mass appeal will come for any virtual world being a one stop shop. In terms of Second Life I’ve said that it needed to reach the stage where people weren’t thinking they were visiting Second Life, they were thinking of playing an elf on a platform running Second Life technology, or going to a concert, running Second Life technology. The technology being a discussion area for techie types and the experience itself being something people enjoy for the experience itself.
High Fidelity is aiming for a more immersive experience, with facial movements and tracking of your own body movements. The article quotes Jeremy Bailenson, who leads Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction lab, who on his visit to High Fidelity said :
the experience I got was ‘It really feels like there’s another person here
As I type this, pausing to scratch my beard and wondering whether I should go and shave, I ponder whether I’d be doing that in High Fideilty, where my eyes would be wandering in a more immersive environment and whether my subconscious behaviour would change, it almost certainly would because we adjust ourselves to the situation we’re in and if it feels like other people are really there our own human instinct will naturally adjust, it’s an exciting and at the same time worrisome train of thought because it’s so different to that we’re used to in our current virtual environments. The article quotes Philip Rosedale :
We want you to interact with other people in an emotionally normal way
That’s going to be an interesting step in the process of virtual reality but one that in the long term is surely going to happen as virtual environments become more immersive. The article also points out, quite rightly in my opinion, that High Fidelity is gathering pace at just the right time :
But Rosedale has picked a good time to test his ideas again. Though the hysteria hasn’t reached the levels of 2005, popular enthusiasm about virtual worlds is surging again thanks to Oculus. Huge expectations await the consumer version of the Rift goggles, due by 2016, and competing products in development by Sony and Samsung. All are expected to retail for only hundreds of dollars. Journalists and software developers have had enough access to prototypes to be convinced that the basic technical problem with virtual reality—how to fool the human visual system into perceiving virtual space as real—is nearly solved. Whether this new hardware will lead to anything beyond extra-immersive video games is unclear, but the field is more open to new ideas than it has been for a long time.
Linden Lab’s next generation virtual world will also surface during this period and I’m sure others are pondering whether or not to enter the arena. Games certainly will. Whether or not it’s too early for people to embrace virtual reality in massive numbers remains to be seen. I certainly have concerns about whether the peripherals will be too invasive for people to really embrace the technology, after all 3D movies have been coming and going for over a century and still haven’t been able to gain a major foothold in our viewing experience. Some people feel we’ll never really adapt to 3D movies, that they make us uncomfortable, but then again people once felt that we wouldn’t be able to watch colour cartoons on the big screen.
Virtual Reality is coming and High Fidelity look well placed to take advantage of it, so do Linden Lab and of course Second Life itself isn’t going to disappear any time soon for those who prefer that experience, heck retro gaming is still going strong with emulators for the C64 and ZX Spectrum thriving. Old habits are hard to break. There are of course those who theorise that virtual reality is already here and we’re all part of the machine, but that’s really a discussion for a Saturday night down the pub after a few pints of lager!
The MIT Technology Review article makes for a very interesting read and there’s a fun video on the page of the article in which we see some of the immersive features of High Fidelity at play, alas I can’t see a way to embed it here.